Royal Lessons and New Plans

In a drowsy turn of events, I had embarrassed the entire kingdom by falling asleep during my welcome back party. Queen Serena wasn't happy, but she was able to accept that it wasn't really my fault. The party had apparently been rescheduled to the end of the month, when I would make my final decision.

Learning the way of the castle was difficult. From the decision-making to the law ordering, to helping people in the village solve their problems. Even the tiniest of detail were overly criticized if done incorrectly. As a teenager who usually did nothing more than read, finish her homework, and do her chores everyday, such a large transition was practically eating me for breakfast!

"Lesson one; eddicate," Queen Serena told me after breakfast that morning. Apparently I was eating like a ungrateful pig with my 'ginormous' bites and 'exaderated' features. I was expecting a lesson and a makeover montage, but the way mermaids eat was different from people on land. Starting at the center of the meal of seaweed, it is common to take two types of sharpened shells (as a stand-in for a human fork and knife) and rotate the food in a circle until the seaweed was cut in a spiral. How useless.

It didn't take me too long to get a grasp on the concepts, but that was only day one. Day two was a whole other story. I was given a tour of the large city and requested to harvest some coral in the reef for decoration of the city. The head of the coral harvesting department taught me to only take the dying coral. That way the reef wouldn't be destroyed.

Day three was my first introduction to the religion of the sea. You see, the entire magical world worshiped the same god, but there were different ways of doing it in each kingdom and city. In Aquasoa, you must bring to the god Vallarial a treasure at the end of each month to give something back to him. The citizens must kiss the offering to bless it with loyalty and friendship. Weekly offerings were for children of the ruin, meaning members of the mermaid church. I had studied that for the rest of that along with other tasks for the rest of the week.

The first time I got to do it was on the Sunday following my arrival and failed party. In my adventures to the reef, I had picked up a shell I thought was pretty and decided to keep it. It turned out that it came in handy.

When I threw the shell into the shell into the fountain in the center of the temple of ruins, something strange happened. The atmosphere shifted and it was beginning to scare me. The ruins shook before the shell desolved into dust.

"Does that mean Vallarial likes it?" I asked, hoping he would accept my offering. The queen nodded with a smile about how much I had grown over the course of a short week.

A month later... (Hope)

Like I mentioned before, there were some strings to pull for the sake of class M-5's missing student, but I convinced my mom to convince the head of the school to let us go on a field trip. It was for educational purposes of course, but a trip to another sea was almost impossible to plan. You should have seen Kayhari when she stepped up to the challenge! She was all about the planning and making it fool-proof. (And Samm proof, but you didn't hear it from me.)

This plan wasn't some secret agent spy mission where the entire class had to camouflage in the crowd and find Lily. My mom sent a letter to the queen of Aquasoa requesting to have our class stay for a little. An invitation had come back say that the entire class was officially invited to stay in a facility near the shore of the Aquasoa.

Since I was the only one with fairy magic, I was the only one that could turn into a mermaid and attend Lily's crowning ceremony. The class groaned at the news that Lily would have to make time to come on land before the party to say hi.

The morning our ride came, we were whisked away to the ocean.